Microelectronic manufacturing techniques have led to the miniaturization of numerous devices. Mobile phones, personal digital assistant devices, and digital cameras are very common examples of the miniaturization trend.
One device that has not seen the advantage of microelectronic manufacturing techniques is the printer. Commercially available printers are large compared to many of the devices they could support. For instance, it is impractical to carry a color printer for the purpose of instantly printing photographs taken with known compact digital cameras.
A compact printhead has been described in co-pending United States Patent Applications filed simultaneously to the present application and hereby incorporated by cross reference:
U.S. Ser. No.Title09/575,152Fluidic seal for an ink jet nozzle assembly09/575,141Ink jet printhead having a moving nozzle with anexternally arranged actuator09/575,125Method of manufacture of an ink jet printhead havinga moving nozzle with an externally arranged actuator09/575,176Ink jet printhead nozzle array09/575,147Nozzle guard for an ink jet printhead
In order to put a compact printer system into practical effect it is necessary to be able to capture an image for printing. An image can be captured by various forms of sensors but a popular sensor is a Bayer color filter array (CFA). The captured image must be processed to a suitable form for printing. Various techniques for processing the Bayer CFA image are known but they suffer from various drawbacks that make an alternative method desirable.